Investigation ordered into Pandora Papers, but not into Pegasus spying case?
On Monday, just a day after the Pandora papers leak of documents relating to potentially illegal diversion of money to avoid taxes was reported, the government ordered an investigation. But despite huge demands, the government did no such thing regarding the Pegasus spying case.
The Pandora Papers leak, first reported on Sunday, October 3, is causing waves across the world. It is a massive leak of financial documents published by several major news organisations on Sunday, tying public figures and businessmen around the world, including in India, to secret stores of wealth.
King Abdullah of Jordan, Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis and associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin have been named by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which obtained the files.
Surprisingly, along with six as-yet-unnamed politicians from India, cricket icon Sachin Tendulkar’s name also figures in the list.
The ICIJ report mentions Tendulkar in its report, though it also says that “Mr Tendulkar’s attorney said the cricket player’s investment is legitimate and has been declared to tax authorities”.
The ICIJ, which involved the BBC and The Guardian newspaper in the UK, The Indian Express in India and 147 other media outlets in its investigation, said it obtained the trove of more than 11.9 million confidential files, amounting to about 2.94 terabytes of data, linked to about 35 current and former national leaders, and more than 330 politicians and public officials in 91 countries and territories, to find secret financial dealings of many super-rich.
The Indian government has woken up to the enormity of the whole thing. On Monday, just a day after the Pandora Papers were first reported, the Ministry of Finance announced that a multi-agency group headed by the chief of Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT), and representatives from the Enforcement Directorate, Reserve Bank of India and the Financial Intelligence Unit will monitor the reports and follow up relevant leads.
“The relevant investigative agencies would undertake investigation in these cases and appropriate action would be taken in such cases as per law,” the ministry said in a statement.
This alacrity is good to see, but then, it also begs the question, which also involves a prominent ‘P’: What about the Pegasus spying case?
Despite demands from across the country and from opposition politicians and civil society members across the country, the government was hell-bent on not ordering an investigation. The case involved spying using the Pegasus spyware, bought from the Israeli NSO Group, on the phones of prominent public personalities, business people and officials.
In the end, it was the Supreme Court which announced that it would form a committee for that purpose.
Why is this so? Is it because members of the government and its agencies are allegedly involved in the spying on ordinary citizens, who have no reason to be spied upon other than for insidious purposes? For now, there are no answers but only suspicions, and very strong ones at that.
Of course, it remains to be seen what comes out of either of the two investigations.
The Pandora Papers follows leaks of two major troves of confidential documents—the Panama Papers in 2016 and the Paradise Papers in 2017, and both involving the ICIJ—relating to offshore investments, exposing how money was hidden by the wealthy in ways that law enforcement agencies could not detect.
The Panama Papers involved Indians too, but not much action followed from the government.
